Stubborn Heart

Stubborn Heart's 2013 eponymous debut album impressively showcases the duo of Ben Fitzgerald and Luca Santucci's stark yet atmospheric electronic soul sound. While there is certainly an arty, experimental quality to the album, Stubborn Heart clearly have a love of straightforward romantic R&B, propulsive dubstep, and even '80s new wave, all sounds that you can hear seeping in and out of the songs here. Sonically, many of the tracks on Stubborn Heart have a deeply layered and icy core that can at times seem hard to penetrate, and the band sometimes takes its time to reveal a pop hook. However, Santucci's evocative lead vocal croon, often framed by chilly synths and buzzy percussion loops, keeps you fascinated by where each song is going. Often moving between an anodyne falsetto and a more resonant baritone, Santucci comes off as a kind of plaintive and torchy frontman in the mold of Scott Walker. In that sense, Stubborn Heart find a middle ground between the goth-influenced sound of the xx and the soulful if more operatic approach of Hurts. Ultimately, tracks such as "Penetrate" and "Two Times a Maybe" reveal themselves in epic, languid style, while more immediately infectious cuts like "Better Than This" and "Starting Block" bring to mind the '90s R&B fixations of Black Tie White Noise-era David Bowie. ~ Matt Collar